Where the data comes from
Two kinds of thing sit on the map, and they aren’t the same. When somebody finds a tree that’s on record, it becomes both.
Cool Trees
A tree somebody went to, photographed and said something about. Every one was put there by a person. Nothing here is generated and no activity is ever invented: no fake accounts, no fake photographs, no fake votes.
Trees on record
A tree somebody has surveyed, measured and written down, which nobody here has been to see. All it has is a species, a position and whatever the surveyor recorded: no photograph, and nobody’s reason for liking it. Go and see one, photograph it and say why it’s worth seeing, and it goes on the map as a Cool Tree, found by you, drawn green with a brown middle so it still shows as ancient.
Only the Woodland Trust’s ancient and veteran trees are drawn as brown pins. The 1.1 million London street trees aren’t: nobody travels to see a sycamore on a verge, and forty thousand dots to a borough buried the ones worth travelling to. Those records still do the quieter half of the work, telling you what’s already recorded where you’re standing.
You don’t have to start with these. Any tree can go on the map.
about 69,000 on the map · 7 found so far
The surveys
Positions in both are survey points rather than measurements taken at the trunk, so expect to be within a few metres. Species, height, girth and age are the surveyor’s, not ours.
Council tree surveys
about 1.1 million trees
The London boroughs’ own records of the trees they maintain in streets, parks and estates, published by the Greater London Authority. Mostly ordinary street trees, which is rather the point: the good ones are hiding among them.
The dataset on the London DatastoreThe Ancient Tree Inventory
about 69,000 trees
Ancient, veteran and notable trees across the UK, mapped by volunteers for the Woodland Trust and the Tree Register of the British Isles. These are the oaks and yews with centuries on them. Only the ones you can actually get to are on this map; trees on private land are left off, because an app that says “go and find it” shouldn’t send you over a fence.
The Ancient Tree InventoryCouncil tree data contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
Ancient Tree Inventory, Woodland Trust, accessed 08/26. Data reproduced with the permission of The Woodland Trust.
Maps by OpenStreetMap contributors. Species identification from photographs by Pl@ntNet, with background from Wikipedia.